F1 Super Licence: Points, Requirements and How to Get One
F1 super licence requirements set out for UK readers: the 40 points, the age limit, the 300 km test and the route a British driver takes from F4 to F2.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Formula 1 Explained26 min read
- Points required
- 40
- Qualifying window
- 3 seasons
- Minimum age
- 18
- Test distance in an F1 car
- 300 km
Oliver Bearman, from Chelmsford, was 18 when Ferrari put him in a Grand Prix car at Jeddah in March 2024 with less than a day's notice. Nobody at the FIA had to be telephoned for permission. He already held a super licence, because the paperwork had been done long before, and the paperwork is the same for a stand-in as it is for a world champion.
To race in Formula 1 a driver must hold an FIA Super Licence, and Appendix L of the International Sporting Code sets the conditions. The applicant needs an International Grade A competition licence from a national authority, which for a British driver is Motorsport UK. They must be 18 at the start of their first Grand Prix weekend, have scored at least 40 points on the FIA's table across the previous three seasons, have completed 80% of two full seasons in recognised single-seater championships, have driven 300 km in a representative F1 car at racing speed, and have passed a test on the rules. A seventh condition, a valid road driving licence, stood from 2016 until June 2024, when the FIA deleted it.
The seven checks in Appendix L before a driver may race
The list is shorter than its reputation suggests, and most of it is administrative. Only two items are hard to satisfy. The rest are forms, a test and a couple of days at a circuit.
Start with the Grade A licence. International competition licences are graded, and the national sporting authority issues them on the FIA's behalf: Motorsport UK in Britain, the FFSA in France, ACI in Italy. A driver climbs the grades by finishing races at the level below, so anyone who has reached Formula 3 or Formula 2 holds a Grade A as a matter of course. The super licence sits above it and is issued by the FIA itself, on an application lodged through that same national body.
Age is the second check, and it is measured at a precise moment: the start of the driver's first F1 competition, meaning the first weekend they take part in. The third is the rules test, taken once, at first application, on the International Sporting Code and the F1 Sporting Regulations. Nobody in the paddock describes it as difficult. It exists so that no driver can later say they did not know what a blue flag required of them.
Fourth, the 300 km. The applicant must have driven that distance in a representative Formula 1 car, consistently at racing speeds, inside two days and within the 180 days before the application. A team usually arranges it in a car a couple of seasons old, since the testing rules restrict current machinery, and the national authority of the country where the test took place certifies the mileage. Mileage logged during a Grand Prix weekend counts too. Three hundred kilometres is roughly a race distance. One clean day at Silverstone covers it.
Then the two that matter. The driver must have completed at least 80% of each of two full seasons in single-seater championships on the FIA's list, which stops a driver arriving after one brilliant year, and must have reached 40 points in three. The seventh check was the road licence, and its removal is covered further down this page alongside the driver who prompted it.
- Grade A licenceThe national authority, Motorsport UK for a British driver, has issued an International Grade A competition licence.
- Two seasonsThe driver has completed 80% of each of two full seasons in single-seater championships on the FIA's list.
- Forty pointsResults across the previous three seasons add up to at least 40 on the Supplement 1 table.
- AgeThe driver will be 18 at the start of the first F1 competition, or has been granted a dispensation at 17.
- 300 kmA team has run the driver for 300 km in a representative F1 car at racing speed within two days.
- Rules testThe applicant has passed the FIA's test on the Sporting Code and the F1 Sporting Regulations.
The conditions in Appendix L of the International Sporting Code as amended in June 2024, in the order a junior driver usually meets them. The road licence requirement that ran from 2016 was removed in that amendment.
How the 40 super licence points are counted, series by series
Supplement 1 to Appendix L is a grid. Championships run down the side, finishing positions across the top, and each cell holds a number. A driver's final position in a season's standings is looked up, the points are banked, and three seasons are added together. Race wins, poles and fastest laps count for nothing unless they move the final championship position.
The table below gives the lines a British reader is most likely to care about, as they stood for 2026. It is not the whole supplement. Super Formula, the Formula Regional series outside Europe, sports car racing, NASCAR, touring cars and senior karting all have rows of their own, most of them paying far less.
| Championship | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9th | 10th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FIA Formula 2 | 40 | 40 | 40 | 30 | 20 | 10 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 3 |
| IndyCar, from 2026 | 40 | 30 | 25 | 20 | 15 | 10 | 8 | 6 | 3 | 1 |
| FIA Formula 3 | 30 | 25 | 20 | 15 | 12 | 9 | 7 | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| Formula E | 30 | 25 | 20 | 10 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| WEC, Hypercar class | 30 | 24 | 20 | 16 | 12 | 10 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 2 |
| Formula Regional European | 25 | 20 | 15 | 10 | 7 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| FIA-certified Formula 4 | 12 | 10 | 7 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| GB3 | 10 | 7 | 5 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Why the top three in Formula 2 all get the full 40
Look at the first row. First, second and third in Formula 2 are each handed the entire requirement in one season, and fourth gets 30. No other championship on the list treats its podium that way. The FIA wants its own final step to be the obvious route, so it built the table to guarantee that anyone who finishes in the top three there is eligible without needing a single point from elsewhere, provided the two-season condition has been met along the way.
How little the lower rungs pay
A Formula 4 title is worth 12. That covers every FIA-certified national series, British F4 included, and the figure tells a 16-year-old champion something useful: the title has bought less than a third of a super licence, and the points will have dropped out of the window before most drivers are ready to use them. GB3, the British series that sits between F4 and international Formula 3, pays its champion 10. F1 Academy pays 10 as well.
The three-season window and the bonuses that sit on top of it
Points have a shelf life. The code counts what a driver scored in the three calendar years before the application, and anything older is gone. A Formula 3 title won four seasons ago is worth exactly nothing today, however well it has aged in the memory.
This is the clause that catches drivers who stall. Someone who wins a Formula Regional title, has a good first year in Formula 3 and then spends two indifferent seasons in Formula 2 can watch their total fall each winter as the strong early results drop off the back of the window and nothing of equal size replaces them. The table rewards momentum. It was designed to.
One relaxation exists. During the pandemic the FIA allowed a driver to count the best three of the previous four seasons where one of them had been disrupted, and that provision turned up in several later cases, including the best-known refusal of all, which the next section deals with. Whether it applies in a given year depends on the wording of that year's Appendix L, and the wording has been touched more than once.
There is a limit on stacking, too. As the code has stood in recent editions, a driver may bank points from no more than two championships in a calendar year, and only where the second begins after the first has ended. That is why the winter series in New Zealand and the Middle East, which finish before the European season opens, have become popular with drivers a few points short.
Small additions for clean driving and Friday mileage
Three bonuses can be added to the championship points, and none is large.
A driver who completes a season in an FIA championship that runs a penalty-point system, without collecting a single penalty point, receives two. A driver who covers at least 100 km in a free practice session at a Grand Prix earns one point for that event, capped at ten across the three-year window. The winner of the Macau Grand Prix gets a bonus scaled to the category of car being raced there: five in the years it ran to Formula 3 rules, three for Formula Regional machinery, two for the Formula 4 race.
Add those up for a driver who is doing everything right and they might be worth six or eight points across three years. For somebody stranded on 34, that is the difference. Teams know it, which is one reason a junior a few points short will be found in an F1 car on Friday mornings as often as the rules allow. The job those drivers do the rest of the time is covered in our guide to what an F1 reserve driver actually does.
Why IndyCar drivers kept falling short of the 40
Colton Herta had won seven IndyCar races by the autumn of 2022, when Red Bull wanted to put him in an AlphaTauri for the following season. He had 32 super licence points. On 23 September that year the FIA confirmed that an enquiry had been made, that Herta did not have the points required, and that no exemption would be granted.
Even the 32 leaned on a concession. His three most recent seasons had ended third, fifth and tenth in the standings, worth 20, 8 and 1 under the table then in force. It was the pandemic provision, letting him swap in a seventh place from 2019 for that tenth, that lifted him from 29 to 32.
The case against the table was simple and it was made loudly in America. IndyCar is a professional championship with a full field of experienced drivers and former F1 racers in it, raced on ovals, street circuits and road courses. Its champion earned 40, which was fair. But third place paid 20, the same as third in Formula 3, a category for teenagers, and fourth paid 10. A driver could spend three years finishing in IndyCar's top five against that field and still be told he was unqualified for a Grand Prix.
The FIA's answer was that it does not govern IndyCar, cannot vouch for its standards in the way it can for its own ladder, and had no wish to reopen the era of case-by-case favours. There is something in that. An exemption for Herta because a big team wanted him would have been precisely the kind of decision the points system was introduced to prevent.
Both things were true. The table undervalued IndyCar and the refusal was still correct.
The FIA conceded the first point three years later. In December 2025 the World Motor Sport Council approved a revised IndyCar row, effective from 1 January 2026, which left the champion on 40 and the runner-up on 30 but lifted every place from third to ninth. Herta did not wait for it. He left IndyCar at the end of 2025 for a test role with Cadillac's new F1 team and a season in Formula 2, the conventional route, taken at 25.
The F1 super licence age limit and the 17-year-old who caused it
Melbourne, 15 March 2015. Max Verstappen started the Australian Grand Prix for Toro Rosso aged 17 years and 166 days, having raced cars, as opposed to karts, for a single season. He had finished third in the FIA European Formula 3 Championship in 2014 and gone straight to a Grand Prix seat. He could not legally drive himself to the circuit in most European countries.
His signing had been announced the previous August, when he was 16. By the first week of January 2015, two months before he had turned a wheel in a race, the FIA had published the rules that would stop anyone doing it again. From 2016 an applicant had to be 18, hold a road driving licence, have spent two years in junior single-seaters and have reached 40 points on a new table. Verstappen, under the rule his own arrival produced, would have been short on every count.
The irony is not lost on anyone that he then turned out to be one of the best drivers the sport has seen. The rule was not really about him. It was about the precedent, and about the fact that a team had judged a 16-year-old ready on the strength of a year's results and the FIA had possessed no objective way to disagree.
The June 2024 amendment
For eight years the age line was absolute. Then, in June 2024, the FIA rewrote the clause. The minimum stayed at 18, but a sentence was added allowing the governing body, at its sole discretion, to grant a super licence at 17 to a driver judged to have recently and consistently demonstrated outstanding ability and maturity in single-seater formula car competition.
The same amendment removed the road licence condition from both the full licence and the practice-only version. It had always been an odd requirement. Passing a test in a hatchback says nothing about a driver's fitness for a Grand Prix, and in countries where the minimum driving age is 18 it simply duplicated the age rule.
The change was widely read as being made with Mercedes' junior Kimi Antonelli in mind, and in the end he did not need it: he first drove in a Grand Prix practice session at Monza days after his 18th birthday. The driver who did use the clause was British. In June 2025 the World Motor Sport Council approved a licence for Arvid Lindblad, a Red Bull junior then aged 17, and he drove in first practice at Silverstone the following month.
Note the limits of the discretion. It covers age only. A 17-year-old still needs the 40 points, the two seasons and the 300 km.
The Free Practice Only super licence and the lower bar it sets
Not everyone in an F1 car on a Friday holds the full licence. Appendix L provides a second document, the Free Practice Only Super Licence, which permits its holder to take part in practice sessions at a Grand Prix and nothing else. No qualifying. No race.
The bar is lower in one place. In lieu of 40 points the applicant needs 25 across the previous three seasons, or must have completed six races in Formula 2. The other conditions track the full licence closely: a Grade A licence, the same age rule with the same discretion at 17, the rules test at first application, and running in an F1 car beforehand so that a Grand Prix weekend is not the first time the driver has sat in one. The FIA tightened this licence late in the 2010s, having concluded that teams were selling Friday seats to drivers with thin records.
| Condition | Full super licence | Free Practice Only |
|---|---|---|
| Competition licence | International Grade A | International Grade A |
| Points over three seasons | 40 | 25, or six Formula 2 races |
| Minimum age | 18, or 17 by FIA discretion | 18, or 17 by FIA discretion |
| Rules test | At first application | At first application |
| What it permits | Practice, qualifying, sprint, race | Free practice sessions only |
| Probation | 12 months from first issue | 12 months from first issue |
How teams use it for the Friday rookie rule
Since 2022 the Sporting Regulations have obliged every team to give up race drivers' practice time to a newcomer. The original requirement was one Friday practice session per car across the season. From 2025 it doubled to two per car, four per team. The rookie must be a driver who has started no more than two Grands Prix.
That obligation is where the practice-only licence earns its keep. A team's academy driver in the middle of a Formula 2 season will often have 25 points and not yet 40, and this document lets the team meet its quota with someone it is developing anyway. Each session over 100 km also banks the driver a bonus point towards the full licence, so the two systems feed one another.
Race drivers do not love it. Losing an hour of running at a circuit they need to learn is a real cost, and teams tend to schedule the rookie sessions at tracks where set-up is well understood.
Penalty points: twelve in twelve months and a one-race ban
The words "points on the licence" mean two unrelated things in Formula 1, and they pull in opposite directions. The 40 qualifying points get a driver in. Penalty points can put one out.
The second system dates from 2014. When the stewards penalise a driver for an incident, they may add penalty points to the super licence alongside any time penalty or grid drop: one for something minor, two for causing a collision in the ordinary run of things, three for the more dangerous cases. Each point stays on the licence for 12 months and falls away on the anniversary of the day it was imposed. Reach 12 at any moment and the licence is suspended for the following event. After the ban, the 12 are removed and the driver starts again. How the panel that hands them out is appointed is set out in our piece on the stewards and the race director.
For a decade nobody got there. Then Kevin Magnussen did it inside six months.
| Event in 2024 | Offence | Penalty points |
|---|---|---|
| Saudi Arabian Grand Prix | Causing a collision | 3 |
| Chinese Grand Prix | Causing a collision | 2 |
| Miami, sprint and Grand Prix | Leaving the track repeatedly in the sprint, a collision in the race | 5 |
| Italian Grand Prix | Causing a collision | 2 |
| Total | Suspended for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix | 12 |
Haas put Bearman in the car at Baku, and he scored a point. Magnussen returned at the next race with a clean licence, which he observed was the one consolation.
His case exposed the awkward part of the design. Half of his ten points before Monza had come from a single weekend in Miami, three of them in a sprint where he had, by his own account, driven tactically to hold up a rival for his team-mate's benefit, accepting time penalties as the price. The time penalties cost him nothing he valued. The points did, months later, at a different circuit, for a routine racing collision. A system intended to catch the persistently dangerous had caught the persistently cynical instead, which may be no bad thing but is not what the regulation says it is for.
Max Verstappen sat on 11 for part of 2025 after a collision at the Spanish Grand Prix. One more minor offence before the oldest points expired would have benched the reigning world champion for a race.
- 12Points that trigger a ban
- 12Months each point lasts
- 1Races missed
- 2014Year the system began
From the F1 Sporting Regulations. Points are added by the stewards and are separate from the 40 qualifying points needed to obtain the licence.
What a super licence costs and why the champion pays the most
The licence is not free, and the bill follows a formula that surprises people the first time they see it. There is a flat basic fee, the same for everyone. On top comes a charge for every world championship point the driver scored in the season just finished.
The points counted are world championship points, sprint results included, so the bill is fixed by the final standings in December and nothing that happens afterwards changes it. It attaches to the person and not to the seat: a driver who moves teams over the winter takes the invoice along.
So a rookie pays the basic fee alone. A driver who finished the previous year with 100 points pays the fee plus a hundred times the per-point rate. And the world champion, having by definition scored more than anyone else, receives the largest invoice in the paddock as a reward.
The FIA sets the amounts in euros and adjusts them for inflation, so any figure dates quickly. One example fixes the scale. For the 2024 licence the basic fee was 10,400 euros and the rate 2,100 euros a point. Verstappen had scored 575 points in 2023, a record, which produced a bill of 1,217,900 euros, also a record. The following year's rates were higher, and his fee still fell, because he had scored fewer points.
Who writes the cheque is a contractual matter between driver and team, and in most cases the team is understood to pay. That has not stopped the drivers objecting on principle. Both the basic fee and the per-point charge were pushed up sharply for 2008, the Grand Prix Drivers' Association protested, and the increase was pared back after talks the following year. The structure itself survived.
It is a strange tax when looked at squarely. The fee funds the FIA's safety and regulatory work, which is a reasonable thing to charge for, but it scales with success and not with cost or risk. A driver who scores heavily has not consumed more of the stewards' time than one who finishes last. Usually less.
Keeping a super licence and getting one back after time away
A super licence runs for a calendar year and lapses on 31 December. Renewal for an active driver is a formality: the code asks that the holder made at least five Grand Prix starts in the previous year, or 15 across the previous three, and anyone with a race seat clears that without noticing.
A new licence carries a string. For 12 months from first issue it is probationary, and the FIA may review and withdraw it at any point in that period. This applies to the practice-only version as well.
The clause has been used. In 2006 Yuji Ide started the season with the new Super Aguri team and was plainly out of his depth; after four races, the last of which ended with him tipping another car into a roll at Imola, the FIA advised the team to stand him down and then withdrew the licence. He never raced in Formula 1 again. Cases like that are rare now, which is an argument that the points table does its job: it is hard to arrive unprepared when preparation is the entry condition.
The comeback test
Returning is a different matter, and the code grades it by how long the driver has been gone.
A driver who held a super licence in any of the previous three years is treated as still current. Fernando Alonso's two seasons away before 2021 fell inside that margin. Beyond three years the application becomes a judgement call. The FIA must be satisfied that the driver has recently and consistently demonstrated outstanding ability in single-seater cars, and the 300 km in a representative F1 car has to be done again, as it was the first time.
"Recently" carries the weight in that sentence. A past champion who has spent five years in sports cars is not automatically eligible on reputation, and a driver whose absence followed an injury has to show present ability and not past form. In practice a team planning a comeback arranges private running in an older car, has the mileage certified, and submits the evidence with the application. The practice-only licence often serves as a halfway house: a few Friday sessions demonstrate currency in public before anyone commits to a race seat.
Räikkönen in 2001 and the dispensations the table was built to end
Before 2016 there was no arithmetic. Eligibility rested on a list of qualifying results in the senior junior categories and, for anyone who did not fit the list, on a vote. Broadly, a title or a leading finish in the category directly below Formula 1 was enough, as was a championship in one of the major Formula 3 series, and everything short of that went to the Formula One Commission to be argued over.
Kimi Räikkönen did not fit the list by a distance. When Peter Sauber signed him for 2001 he had contested 23 car races in his life, nearly all of them in Formula Renault, much of it in the British championship with Manor Motorsport. He had never raced in Formula 3 or in Formula 3000, the category immediately below Grands Prix at the time. Sauber had tested him at Mugello the previous September and seen enough.
Max Mosley, then FIA president, opposed the application and said so. The Formula One Commission voted in favour anyway, with Mosley's the only vote against, and the compromise was a licence issued on probation for the first four races of the season, after which the position would be reviewed. Räikkönen finished sixth on his debut in Melbourne, scoring a point at the first attempt. The review was a formality. Six years later he was world champion.
His case is usually cited as proof that the old discretion worked. It proves less than that. The same discretion licensed drivers whose main qualification was the budget they brought, and for every Räikkönen the vote waved through there was someone who spent a season two seconds off the pace and in the way. A system that depends on the commission guessing right will guess wrong with the same confidence.
That was the argument for the points table. It replaced a judgement with a sum, so that a team principal lobbying for a driver had nothing to lobby about: the driver either had 40 or did not. The Herta refusal, uncomfortable as it was, showed the system doing what it was designed to do. The new discretion at 17 is narrow by comparison, since it waives a birthday and nothing else.
Kyalami 1982: the strike over what the licence said
The super licence was introduced in the early 1980s, under Jean-Marie Balestre's FISA, as a way for the governing body to control who raced in the world championship. Its first notable act was to cause a strike.
In January 1982 the drivers arriving for the South African Grand Prix at Kyalami were given the application form for that year's licence. Niki Lauda, returning after two seasons in retirement, read it more carefully than most. It bound a driver to the team named on the form for a period of years, which handed the teams control over a driver's movement, and it carried an undertaking not to do anything harmful to the image of the championship, which read to the drivers like a gag.
Lauda and Didier Pironi, who chaired the drivers' association, organised a refusal. On the first day of practice a coach collected the drivers and took them to the Sunnyside Park Hotel in Johannesburg, where they shut themselves in a function room and stayed overnight on mattresses so that no team could pick them off one at a time. Elio de Angelis and Gilles Villeneuve played the piano. Jochen Mass stayed away and Teo Fabi left during the night; the rest held.
Team owners talked of sacking the lot and hiring replacements. There were no replacements to hire, not for a Grand Prix, and everyone in the paddock knew it.
By the next morning the organisers had backed down far enough for the drivers to return, and the race went ahead two days after the walk-out, won by Alain Prost for Renault. FISA then fined the participants between 5,000 and 10,000 US dollars each and imposed suspended bans. The FIA's own Court of Appeal later reduced the penalties and was critical of how the matter had been handled. The offending clauses went.
The grid has rarely acted as one body against the governing authority since. The licence survived as a certificate of competence and a disciplinary instrument, and the contractual business of who drives for whom was left to a separate body, the Contract Recognition Board, set up in the following decade.
From British F4 to a Grand Prix grid: the route for a UK driver
For a driver holding a Motorsport UK licence the ladder is well marked, and the points available on each rung explain why hardly anyone stays in Britain for long.
Karting comes first and earns almost nothing: the senior FIA world karting title is worth four points, and national championships are not on the table at all. The age at which a child can begin, and what the classes cost, is in our guide to starting karting in the UK. Cars begin at 15 with the British F4 Championship, which races on the British Touring Car Championship support bill and carries the standard Formula 4 row.
| Step | Where it races | Points for the title | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| British F4 | British circuits, largely on the touring car bill | 12 | A first season in cars and a first entry on the table |
| GB3 | Mainly British circuits | 10 | A faster car, modest points |
| Formula Regional European | Continental circuits | 25 | A meaningful total and tracks used by Formula 1 |
| FIA Formula 3 | Grand Prix weekends | 30 | Three-quarters of the requirement |
| FIA Formula 2 | Grand Prix weekends | 40 | The whole requirement for any of the top three |
Run the arithmetic on a realistic career. A British F4 title, 12. Third in FIA Formula 3 two years later, 20. Sixth in a first Formula 2 season, 10. That makes 42, and it is close to the line Bearman took, with his Formula 4 title won in Italy. It took three seasons of finishing near the front at each level, and a single poor year in the middle would have left him short.
The alternative is brute force. Finish in the top three in Formula 2 and nothing else matters, provided the driver has two qualifying seasons behind them. A GB3 title followed by an FIA Formula 3 title also makes exactly 40, on paper, though no team would put a driver in a Grand Prix car on that record alone.
Why the British rungs are stepping stones
Twelve and ten are small numbers, and they are small on purpose. The FIA's table pays for international competition on Grand Prix circuits, and a domestic series, however well run, is graded as preparation for that. A driver who wins British F4 and GB3 in consecutive years holds 22 points and has completed the two seasons the code demands. What they have really bought is a seat in the conversation for an FIA Formula 3 drive, which is where the points get serious.
Adults coming to the sport late should be realistic about this ladder. It is built for teenagers on academy budgets. The licence most British club racers need is a national one, and the way to earn that is described in our guide to how to start car racing in the UK. Women racing in F1 Academy are on the same table, with ten points for the champion.
For the wider picture of the sport from a British seat, the motorsport section collects our technical explainers, and the England hub lists every guide in this series, circuits and champions included.